Portable terminals have quickly become popular owing to the convenience of carrying. Accordingly, service providers (e.g., system manufacturers) are competitively developing terminals having more special functions to accommodate many users. For example, the portable terminals are providing various functions of phone books, games, schedulers, short messages, the Internet, electronic mail (e-mail) messages, morning wakeup calls, MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3) players, digital cameras, electronic dictionaries, e-books, and such.
Recently, an e-book, one of the information provision media replacing a conventional paper book, is being introduced to show text contents in an electronic display manner. The e-book is of a scheme in which, after storing text contents in a flash memory or a built-in hard disk, the stored text contents are shown through a display screen. The e-book has an advantage of being capable of, after storing a large amount of book stories at a time, selecting and showing desired portions of text.
At this time, the display screen can display only contents of a restricted region. Accordingly, to continuously and seamlessly show the next story of the contents, a User Interface (UI) providing a page move or scroll function should be provided. Generally, the e-book can show a story of text contents on a screen while moving through a page up/page down function using a key input means provided in the e-book. Through this method, a user can read the full story of the text contents stored in the e-book.
However, a UI of a scheme of turning pages through key manipulation as above is merely of a direction control scheme of the most basic form and is not designed from an ergonomic viewpoint of making it convenient for a user to use. So, there is a problem that it is inconvenient for the user to convert pages of contents naturally.